Irish Writers Research Articles

Diagrama e catástrofe: Deleuze e a produção de imagens pictóricas

O artigo é uma leitura das duas primeiras aulas proferidas por Deleuze em torno da pintura no início de 1981. Seu intuito é expor a articulação entre os conceitos de catástrofe (ou caos, conforme o vocabulário escolhido seja o das aulas ou o de O que é a filosofia?) e de diagrama. Tal par conceitual encontra-se no cerne da produção de fatos pictóricos ou novas imagens com força suficiente para se contrapor ao conjunto de imagens-clichê. Diagrama designa o procedimento por meio do qual o pintor obtém algum ordenamento do caos resultante da dissolução das imagens já vistas e tornadas clichê, permitindo, ainda assim, a continuidade da ação das forças de deformação advindas do caos. Outro tema visitado pelo artigo é a primazia conferida por Deleuze à relação da pintura com o tempo, em detrimento daquela entretida com o espaço. Interessante notar que não só a definição desses conceitos, como também o vocabulário empregado para nomeá-los atesta que foram criados em meio ao estudo das obras pictóricas e textuais dos pintores, como que em parceria com estes.

Carnival Masks by Seán Lysaght (review)

Reviewed by: Carnival Masks by Seán Lysaght Eamonn Wall Seán Lysaght, Carnival Masks. Loughcrew, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 2014. $11.85 (paper); $18.50 (cloth). To a large degree, the Irish view of time, or how Irish people like to imagine time, is a short road defined by history and invasion. Though ancient history, Carrowmore and Newgrange for example, are acknowledged parts of the cultural and historical landscapes, both are dwarfed by what is more recent and what would appear more relevant to contemporary life: St. Patrick, Vikings, Normans, Tudors, and various conflicts and rebellions convey the true weight of history for many. The Irish voice, whether in prose, poetry, music, song, or image, would seem to give artistic and creative life to this view of time: time and voice are working in tandem. Recently, Ireland’s writers—among whom Seán Lysaght can be rated as one of the most gifted—have challenged this prevailing view. Like Tim Robinson, another West of Ireland writer, Lysaght sees time as being longer and deeper than how it is invented in the Irish context. Writing in Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986), Robinson notes that “cosmologists now say that Time began ten or fifteen thousand million years ago” and Robinson’s attachment to this deep time underlines his work. One reason for attaching ourselves closely to a narrow concept of time is the sense that our own lives will appear more resonant and important if the timeline is narrowed from St. Patrick to the present: some Irish writers, guided by science and ecology, seek to separate us from these fallacies. In taking this longer view, Lysaght and Robinson force us to reconsider our relationship to the Irish past and to accept how relative our own importance is: the four hundred year span from the Flight of the Earls to the present counts as but a brief moment in the history of the world. In Carnival Masks, his superb new collection of poetry, Lysaght forcibly brings home not just his deep sense of time, but also the knowledge that human rhythms and life practices pale when compared to other forms of living life such as the seasonal return to Ireland of swallows: until the swallows showed up, that is,winging it low, always switching the game.The place they wanted back was this drive, thisvery porch where they swept in [End Page 154] to chatter over the nests at last year’s doorand start again by confounding every metaphor. Unlike humans, swallows do not claim to own acreages and buildings; rather, they assert a right to use them for periods of time and they do not wish to develop landscape but, instead, seek to quietly renew it by their labors and songs. Their seasonal visitations ask of people to accept their presence as being natural and of nature. What makes the world interesting, moving, and meaningful, we might take from reading Carnival Masks, is the totality of living forms that define this space, and not just what humans have imagined or created. In common with other poets writing in this vein, Lysaght reminds his readers that swallows, for example, do not need humans—for all of our intelligence and power—because they have been doing fine for thousands of years without us, and how we imagine swallows does not improve on the real thing. They are their own reality. In Lysaght’s work, swallows do not merely exist on the periphery of poetry as ornament but are central figures given voice: he breaks down hierarchies to show, as J. Scott Bryson has written in Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002), “the interdependent nature of the natural world,” a view of things, as Seamus Heaney pointed out, that played a vital role in the early Christian period but which was, subsequently, erased to a large degree. Though Lysaght writes in an ecopoetical vein, his work is devoid of ideology: in delicately crafted lyrics, he shows much and tells little or, as Flaubert has said so eloquently, he is everywhere present but nowhere visible. One illustration of interdependence is to be found “Red Deal,” a majestic short poem: Now I’m the...

Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell (review)

Richard Rankin Russell. Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 317. $39.95. The concept encapsulated in term the is traditionally thought of in Ireland as an agricultural event signifying relationship between people and land, when at close of harvest season farming community would gather its crops, rejoice in fruits of hard labor, and mark moment that closes summer and enters autumn. That idea of gathering literally and conceptually frames Richard Rankin Russell's recent publication on Brian Friel's major plays, but, importantly, book approaches it in a wider sense to also suggest travel, machines, ritual, fertility, festival, community, family, and place. Brian Friel, arguably one of worlds greatest living English-language dramatists, continues to be researched, studied, and performed internationally, and Russell's book-length study of five of Friel's major plays is a welcome addition to ever-expanding studies. Language, community, exile, memory, place, ritual, violence, and individual and cultural identity are familiar concerns related to body of research on Friel's work, and Russell's book is not different in this regard. What it is, however, is a comprehensive study of place and space in five of Friel's critically acclaimed plays and impact these have on community. Acknowledging contributions of philosopher Rene Descartes, and drawing on phenomenologist Edward Casey's notion of place and its resistance to modernity, Russell takes his understanding of and as a movement pervading all areas of knowledge, where rational insights produced homogenous accounts of natural events and human experience over dogmatic tradition. This is Russell's third monograph on a Northern Irish writer (one on Bernard McLaverty in 2009 and another on Michael Longley in 2010), with a forthcoming one on Seamus Heaney in 2014. He has essays on Stewart Parker, Brendan Behan, and Friel, and two edited collections: on Martin McDonagh, published in 2007, and on Irish poet Peter Fallon, in 2013. Across his publications, his research reflects a strong interest in borders and boundaries, between inner and outer worlds, always moveable and forever fragile, which signal concerns with cultural erosion, loss, and displacement in various ways. Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama contains five chapters, each dedicated to a major play: Philadelphia Here I Come!, The Freedom of City, Faith Healer, Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa. Each chapter expands on author's identified elements of modernism in five plays and how they impact and relate to immediate and distant communities in their environments as well as to each other. What is most interesting, despite Russell's narrow modernist paradigm and his choice to represent Friel by writing on just five of his most popular works, is his discussion of how Friel assimilated aspects of modernity and modernism into environments in his works but did not fully accommodate them. Russell argues that onslaught of modernity is responded to both creatively and with great resistance in Friel's works, demonstrating how different versions of modernity coexist within Ireland's cultural landscape. However, author's examination of modernity does not offer a nuanced enough reading of developments of modernity and modernism as they swept through Europe, Britain, and Ireland at different speeds and with varying impact on countries and regions, to include a broad range of issues such as economies, nations, trade, citizenship, belief systems, capitalism, educational reforms, and so on. Thus, there is a repetitive feel to modernist trajectory and its bearing on concerns in plays throughout. Surprisingly, Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space and Gay McAuley's Space in Performance, important books that connect real and imagined space in making meaning in theater, are not part of research. …

Sinéad Mooney A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and TranslationA Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation. Sinéad Mooney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. viii+278.

<i>Sinéad Mooney</i> A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation<i>A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation</i>. Sinéad Mooney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. viii+278.

Kinship: People and Nature in Emily Lawless’s Poetry

In both her prose writing and her poetry the Irish writer Emily Lawless (1845-1913) considers a number of environmental subjects, from mothing and dredging for shellfish and mollusks to gardening and the decline of the Irish woodland. A recurrent theme in her poetry is the concern for threatened environment, but dystopian images are balanced by portrayals of landscape as a source of spiritual wisdom and healing. Lawless’s focus is often on more insignificant examples of the natural world such as moths, crustaceans or bog-cotton rather than more conventional representations of natural beauty. Lawless was a Darwinist, and several of her poems thematise the interaction between the human and the natural world, frequently reversing the power relationship between humans and natural phenomena. A re-contextualisation of her poetry within the framework of nineteenth-century natural history, Darwinism and early ecological thought brings to the fore her exploration of the connections between nature, self and national belonging.

A Belfast Woman: Shame, Guilt, and Gender in Mary Beckett’s Short Stories of the 1950s

Mary Beckett, who died in November 2013 at the age of eighty-seven, was, as writer Damian Smyth told the Belfast Telegraph upon her passing, “a new voice from an unexpected place.” Although Beckett’s later work is better known, she first emerged as a powerful female voice in Irish literature during the 1950s. During that decade, she wrote several radio plays for BBC Northern Ireland; she was featured as the lone woman in a symposium called “The Young Writer” in the Dublin literary magazine the Bell in 1951; she was included in a special “Women Writers Issue” of Irish Writing, alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and Kate O’Brien, in 1954; and she was given pride of place as author of the lead short story in the Belfast journal Threshold when it launched in 1957. By that time she had married and moved to Dublin, as her biography and byline for that issue indicated. After her second story for Threshold, “The Weaker Sex,” appeared in 1958, she would not publish again for twenty-two years until Sean McMahon, then an editor at Poolbeg Press, encouraged her to gather her previous stories and to write a new one that would become the title piece to her 1980 collection A Belfast Woman. At the time of that anthology’s publication, the marketing campaign for Beckett’s book promoted her as a mother of five children, and she was often interviewed and photographed in her kitchen, with her tile backsplash behind her and flowered curtains at the window, her white hair primly styled, her smile very much resembling stereotypical ideas of what a kind Irish grandmother should look like—although she was only fifty-four-years-old. In 1987, Beckett published her first novel, Give Them Stones, which is often read as a representative work about the “Troubles.” She wrote a second collection of stories, A Literary Woman

Introduction: A Bit of a Writer

‘The boss on the painting job says to me one morning: “Behan, I believe you are a bit of a writer’”. So begins Brendan Behan’s first article for the Irish Press newspaper in 1951, and it catches Behan at an important moment in his transition from house-painter and Republican rebel to the internationally acclaimed writer he became in 1956 when The Quare Fellow was produced in London. By 1951, Behan had published stories in The Bell and Sindbad Vail’s Points magazine in Paris, a handful of Gaelic verse in an important anthology of new Irish writers, Nuabhearsaiocht, and he had written some play drafts which were rejected by the Abbey. The suggestion that he is ‘a bit of a writer’ stirs him to remember, and to quote at length from, a review of Points magazine which had just been published in the Hudson Review, in which his story, ‘After the Wake’, was singled out for praise:

Rhetorical Moves in Applied Linguistics Articles and their Corresponding Iranian Writer Identity

Emerging from Kaplan's (1966) pioneering work on contrastive rhetoric, rhetorical organization is today practiced with current critical views in language teaching and is regarded as a major pedagogical tool in writing various articles. The present study aimed to investigate the possible relationship between generic organizations of research articles in applied linguistics Iranian journals and negotiation of researchers’ identities. Overall, 30 published research-based articles were selected randomly from four journals. After applying Pho's (2008b) model of move analysis, the obtained results were associated with the instances of writer identity using Hyland's framework (2002). The findings demonstrated different percentages of writer identity categories across different moves of articles. Results suggested that rhetorical moves performing various functions in articles need to be carried out by specific categories of authorial identity to better satisfy the expectations of their respective applied linguistics communities.

Study of "Stephen Dedalus ", the main protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, written in 1916, is an authobiography and the first novel of the great Irish writer, James Joyce. It's written in Modernist style. So it can be contain of some category of realism, naturalism, and Marxism which aroused in mid-to late nineteenth century. But it mostly included realistic style because of the begining date of this literary school. By reading all works of James Joyce is maybe committing ownself to a outstanding trickary world of chaosmos (Finnegans Wake, p. 118.21), which stands for poetic mystery that few writers have acheived. In this study attempted is made to survey the main Protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, and its relationship to the author.

The Interstitial Status of Irish Gayness in Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship and The Master

The impact of AIDS on gay writing in the nineteen eighties and nineties is undeniable. At both sides of the Atlantic, British and American writers bore witness to the traumatic phenomenon which for some years threatened with erasing the gay community and its hardly gained culture. If gays had been persecuted for decades, simultaneously invisibilised and visibilised under the pressure of a schizophrenic heteronormativity, things could only worsen with the coming of AIDS. In the nineteen eighties, (diseased) gays had to be easily spotted to be blamed for their sin and be ostracized from society; yet, too much visibility was difficult to abide. While this was happening in Britain and the United States, Catholic Ireland was a priori an even more hostile territory. In Ireland, a character in Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship (1999) points out, the problem 'did not exist' because we don't talk about sex (1999: 146). The pressure of tradition and an all-powerful church have made same-sex desire a taboo not to be mentioned among well-meaning Catholics. The Blackwater Lightship constitutes a reaction against--albeit from within--the Irish status quo. In an interview with Toibin, Angela Meyer points out and recalls the writer's outlook on the precarious condition of gayness in Ireland and (his) Irish writing: In many interviews Toibin does get asked about being an Irish writer, or a gay writer. I asked him how much he feels those aspects are integral to his work. 'Well, they're fundamental, but then the page is not a mirror. So you don't think about them.' Toibin said, in some ways, ie. if you're a man or a woman, it has an effect on the way the world deals with you, but it isn't as though it's what you think of as you wake up in the morning. 'It mightn't effect how you deal with the page,' he said, 'if you're writing a sentence.' In a way it's the writer's job, according to Toibin, 'to get involved in areas of self-suppression and self-annihilation ... whereby the page matters and you are the least burden on the page. But nonetheless, of course those things are important.' I mention, for example, how Kafka's context was important to the production of his work, it can't be left out (writing in German in Prague, Jewishness) but knowing the context isn't imperative to the reading of his work--it resonates through the internal states of his characters and the situations they navigate (2010). As happens with Kafka, Toibin's sociocultural context is not the key to understanding his texts. I do not intend to explore if/how his identity has made an influence on his writing. Yet, (homo)sexuality and Irishness will be addressed as fundamental concepts to understand his part in the literary tradition he belongs to. It is my main concern to analyse the interstitial discourse of gay Irishness in Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship and The Master (2004). The former in particular is deeply embedded in Irish culture as it stands at the crossroads between the country (Catholic) tradition and its re-articulation. This hybridity is particularly precarious with the outburst of AIDS which, for many religious and political leaders, only confirmed the equation gayness=punishment=disease=death. The complex process of (dis)assimilation of sexual dissidence into Irish matriarchy in The Blackwater Lightship recalls The Testament of Mary (2012). The Blackwater Lightship is set in rural Ireland where AIDS-victim Declan returns to die. After spending some years in Dublin as a liberated gay, he goes back home to spend his last months surrounded and nursed by the women of his family, namely his sister Helen, his mother Lily and his grandmother Dora. From the very beginning, the novel calls back the matrilineal tradition of Catholic Ireland. However, contrary to expectations, the relations between the generations of the women in the family are problematic, particularly since Lily's husband died years before. …

Irish Studies Round the World -2013-

Reflections on Irish Writing in 2013 Today in Ireland, we have moved from serious recession to what is hoped is the beginning of a new and better fiscal era. Recently Ireland exited the World Bank bail-out which had caused it to

The German Joyce by Robert K. Weninger (review)

Reviewed by: The German Joyce by Robert K. Weninger Mark Harman The German Joyce. By Robert K. Weninger. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2012. Pp. 257. Cloth $74.95. ISBN 978-0813041667. Joyce’s German debut was less than auspicious, as his terse description of the Munich premiere of Exiles suggests: “Complete fiasco. Row in theatre. Play withdrawn” (15). The reviewers deplored his “spiritual striptease” and excessive “bookishness.” However, as Robert K. Weninger shows in the first comprehensive study of the subject, Joyce’s literary fortunes in German-speaking countries underwent a radical reversal that bears some comparison with the more protracted saga of the German reception of Shakespeare. In both cases, disdain and ignorance evolved into an enthusiastic acceptance of “unser Shakespeare” and—at least among writers—“unser Joyce.” In the first section of the book, Weninger (King’s College, London) offers a comprehensive survey of Joyce’s impact in German-speaking countries over the course of nine decades; in the second he provides several case studies of “coinfluences”—a term that allows Weninger to escape from the straitjacket of literary influence. Then, for good measure, he throws in a description of the astonishing role allotted to Joyce in the so-called German Expressionism debate. A minor drawback to this otherwise effective organization is that the fast-paced survey of German reactions to Joyce comes first. Although Germanisten with an interest in modernism can easily handle the resulting blitz of names, I fear that his primary audience—Joyceans and other readers without much prior exposure to German literature—may feel a little overwhelmed. However, they would be wise to stay the course since German reactions to Joyce are often illuminating. For instance, even in the case of the ill-fated Exiles, one reviewer presciently praised Joyce’s deployment of “silence,” contrasting it with the verbosity of contemporary German-language playwrights. [End Page 205] German writers were quick to grasp the challenge that Joyce posed to traditional forms of narrative. Inspired by the “Galilean revolution” of Ulysses, Hans Henny Jahnn immediately began to restructure his novel Perrudja. Much the same appeared to happen in the case of Berlin Alexanderplatz, although there is some dispute about the degree of Döblin’s indebtedness to Joyce. Whereas Joyce was tickled by the aural similarity between Döblin and Dublin, Döblin was annoyed by critics’ tendency to emphasize his supposed Joyceanisms at the expense of the social criticism in his novel. In a letter to Agnes Meyer in 1944 Thomas Mann, who preferred to remain mum about Joyce, let his mask slip: “I sense an affinity, but would prefer not to admit it since, if this were the case, Joyce had done everything better, more boldly, more elegantly” (59). As the century progresses, the story, as skillfully narrated by Weninger, grows ever more complicated since it becomes impossible to distinguish narrative innovations absorbed through Joyce’s work from the impact of Faulkner, Dos Passos, and others who drew liberally on that innovative compendium of narrative techniques known as Ulysses. Perhaps as a result, poor Arno Schmidt was pilloried for being a mere Joyce-imitator before he had actually read the Irish writer. Schmidt’s exasperation over such unjustified attacks surely underlies his bizarre critical effort to reduce Finnegans Wake to the coded story of how James Joyce was allegedly cuckolded by his long-suffering brother Stanislaus. However, Schmidt could be said to have made amends to Joyce by discrediting Goyert’s flawed translation of Ulysses so thoroughly in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that his onslaught led to the creation of a new, better, if not uncontroversial translation by his student Hans Wollschläger. Weninger’s three case studies in Joycean “coinfluence” alone are worth the price of the book: Goethe and Joyce; Joyce Dada & Co.; Joyce and Rilke. For this reviewer, the latter is the most compelling pairing. Once stated, the parallels between the two authors’ independently reached theory and practice of “sudden spiritual manifestations” or epiphanies seems altogether convincing. Bravely, Weninger even contends that it is not Joyce’s Stephen Hero or Portrait but rather Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge that “constitute(s) the ultimate epitome of...

Winifred M. Patton and the Irish Revival in London

The place of London in the Irish Revival is sometimes overlooked, yet, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the city served as a place where Irish political and cultural identities were reinvigorated amongst the migrant community there and fed directly into events back home. The experience of living in London, at one remove from Ireland, appears to have reinforced a sense of belonging and nationhood for many writers, the most prominent of which was Yeats. This article examines the life and work of Winifred M. Patton, a gifted Irish writer and nationalist who lived there between 1893 and 1914. Whilst she never achieved the same reputation as some of her contemporaries, Patton, nevertheless, published widely in Irish nationalist newspapers of the time. Apart from writing poetry, short stories and essays, she was also active in political and cultural organisations such as the Gaelic League and the Irish Fireside Club helping ferment Irish nationalist aspirations at a crucial turning point in British–Irish relations. Based on new research into an archival collection of Patton's papers, this article examines the relationship between migration, gender and nationalism and the role of literature in mediations of cultural identity in the Irish diaspora.

Seventh Annual James Joyce Research Colloquium: 10–12 April 2014

Seventh Annual James Joyce Research Colloquium: 10–12 April 2014 Ashley Elizabeth Savard (bio) THE CENTENARY OF DUBLINERS: HISTORICAL, DIGITAL, AND ARCHIVAL APPROACHES In the hours before the Seventh Annual James Joyce Research Colloquium began, I decided to take advantage of my brief time in Dublin and stepped out of my room in search of Joyce’s Dublin — something that did not prove too difficult to discover. Despite having only visited Ireland’s capital city only once before I found myself in familiar territory. Thankfully the paths of Dublin on 10 April 2014 were far from ‘rainladen’ and instead were drenched in spring sunshine as I arrived at the ‘grey block of Trinity’ and looked over to the ‘blind columned porch’ of the Bank of Ireland ‘where pigeons roocoocooed’ and palefaced tourists stood snapping pictures with their cameras (P V.212; U 10.343–4). It was easy to imagine M’Coy dodging a banana peel in Temple Bar and Bloom near O’Connell Bridge searching through titles until he arrived on Sweets of Sin: ‘Yes. Take this. The end’ (U 10.512–13). In the reading room of the National Library I looked over an early draft of the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode in their Joyce Papers 2002 collection and imagined Stephen, Eglinton, Lyster, Russell, and Best discussing Shakespeare in the building. On Baggot Street, I thought of Lenehan carefully trailing after Corley and his female companion. My slow walk toward Newman House, where the first evening of the Colloquium was to meet, reminded me of Stephen’s literary fuelled journey to UCD when the then ‘rainladen trees’ made him think of Gerhart Hauptmann, the ‘sloblands of Fairview’ of Newman, North Strand Road of Guido Cavalcanti, and Talbot Place of Ibsen (P V.71–86). Although we joked during the first panel about Joyce’s lack of interest in describing facades or architecture, imagining him walking through the streets of Dublin with his head down and observing the city through imperfect eyesight, I was continually struck by my easy immersion in Joycean Dublin, a testament to his keen ability to populate a city. This year’s James Joyce Research Colloquium, organized by Dr Luca Crispi and Professor Anne Fogarty, opened on the night of 10 April to celebrate the centenary of Dubliners, and the first panel focused appropriately on digital [End Page 167] explorations of Joyce’s works. Dr Scott Hamilton (UCD) began the evening with a glimpse at ‘The Dead’ iPad app, allowing us to view the digital text (based on the first edition), along with its many features, among them an audio version of the text read by Barry McGovern, podcasts delivered by Declan Kiberd, Anne Fogarty, and Gerardine Meaney, images of Dublin in 1914, and a video recording of The Lass of Aughrim. Next, Andrew Kuhn of Boston College gave us access to his digital library, Dubliners Bookshelf, which houses about 30 primary texts as well as explanatory essays and translated materials. The Bookshelf provides a digital space for the printed materials alluded to in Dubliners and uses the ‘digital platform as a means of more fully understanding the analogue technology of the book’. Professor Joseph Nugent, also of Boston College, presented Digital Dubliners, an exploratory and inter-disciplinary tool ‘written for students by students’ which offers context, images, advertisements, maps, student essays, and annotated bibliographies in a new multi-media approach to classroom learning. Closing the first panel, Terence Killeen, James Joyce Centre, and Ed Mulhall, Independent Scholar, took us on a journey through the streets of ‘Two Gallants’ in their Digital Model for Dubliners. Their virtual city, reconstructed from Joyce’s work, is populated with Joyce’s characters, popular songs, emerging technologies, and other exciting props which create a gaming-world experience with layers of exploration that demonstrate the new depths to be gained from linking resources in the digital world. The evening continued with a captivating conversation between Anne Fogarty and Frank McGuinness (UCD). McGuinness described his early encounters with Joyce in an Ireland for which the study of Joyce was typically an extra-curricular activity. Although he admits many Irish writers look at Joyce’s works with some fear and a kind...

An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth

Reviewed by: An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth D. W. Hayton Robert Molesworth . An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor, ed. Justin Champion . Indianapolis : The Liberty Fund , 2011 . Pp. lvii + 394 . $18.49 . Robert, first Viscount Molesworth (1656–1725) was perhaps the most important of the Irish “commonwealthsmen” identified in Caroline Robbins’s pathbreaking study The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Harvard, 1959; reprinted by The Liberty Fund in 2004). Political historians focus on his exposition of “Gothic constitutionalism” as a classic exemplar of libertarian Whiggism, and explore his connections with the third earl of Shaftesbury, whose advocacy of a “polite” culture of civic virtue he is alleged to have brought to Ireland. After 1715, Molesworth, despairing of preferment in England, retired to his Irish estates and ensconced himself within a circle of disciples, including the young Francis Hutcheson, through whom Shaftesbury’s ideas were transmitted to Scotland. Historians of Ireland are interested in Molesworth’s contributions [End Page 186] to the development of a “patriot” interest in the Dublin parliament and the Dublin press after 1714. And historians of Denmark, where Molesworth served unhappily as William III’s envoy extraordinary between 1689 and 1692, still pick over the insults to their native land, its people, and especially its monarchy, contained in the famous (or to, Danes, infamous) Account of the kingdom published in 1694. These different phases of Molesworth’s life reflect an unsettled temperament and disappointed ambition, resulting in a public life marked by sharp changes of direction. For many years, he was torn between settling in Ireland and London; he oscillated between supporting Whig ministries as bastions against “popish” absolutism, and opposing them when he smelled a betrayal of traditional principles; and he was himself alternately attracted by the prospects of office and repelled by the expectations of patronage. Throughout, however, he kept the greater good firmly in view. Devoted to the ideal of liberty and public virtue, he despised tyranny, especially “priestcraft,” whether Roman Catholic or High Anglican. Molesworth’s attributable published writings have been gathered for the first time in this handsomely produced volume, one of a series of principal libertarian tracts in the library of Thomas Hollis, the eighteenth-century English Dissenter whose mission in life was to reprint and circulate works from the canon of English republican thought. Hollis was a particular benefactor of American colleges, including Harvard, and this connection presumably forms the rationale for the series. Molesworth’s editor is Mr. Champion, whose own studies of English anti-clericalism, and of Toland, an Irish writer with a close personal connection to Molesworth, fit him admirably for the task. This edition brings together the Account of Denmark and the full text of Molesworth’s translation of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (the preface of which is often studied separately), and adds an interesting pamphlet from the days of Molesworth’s Irish exile, the Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723), an early example of the literature on Irish “improvement” that reached maturity a decade or so later with the writings of Thomas Prior and Arthur Dobbs. Although the editorial apparatus is minimal (some might wish for more since Molesworth is not important enough to make another edition likely in the near future), Mr. Champion amply explains for the “general reader.” The discussion of the Account of Denmark, with its essential warning that liberty could be imperiled and even destroyed by Protestant as well as Catholic monarchs bent on absolute rule, and of Franco-Gallia, with its account of the ideal “Gothic constitution,” in which liberty was guaranteed by aristocratic virtue, sets Molesworth’s writing in a long chronological and a broad continental perspective. It also integrates them into a vision of liberty’s origins in historical processes. Mr. Champion’s persuasive reading emphasizes Molesworth’s “historical scholarship,” which connects closely with that of Molesworth’s protégé Toland, and finds a link between the Danish and French experience as establishing “how historically contingent these traditions of freedom were.” The afterlife of both texts is discussed...

George Moore in the Footsteps of Ernest Renan in the Holy Land

In 1913, the Irish writer George Moore set sail across the Mediterranean for what was known in those days as The Holy Land. The result of this “fact-finding” mission was the publication in 1916 of the sensational The Brook Kerith — the life of Jesus, seen through the eyes of Joseph of Arimathea. Like his illustrious predecessor Ernest Renan, Moore’s fascination with spirituality owed much to a childhood steeped in the mystical Celtic tradition, which had survived over the ages on the remote North-West Atlantic seaboard. In this article, I will discuss what is hitherto uncharted territory, i.e. the influence of Renan’s 1861 mission in Palestine and the subsequent publications of La Vie de Jésus (1863) on Moore’s itinerary and literary production. To this end, a comparative textual analysis of La Vie de Jésus and The Brook Kerith proves to be more rewarding.

My Father's Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

62 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews we hope to see in Mukherjee’s subsequent writings. Emma Dawson Varughese Institute of English Studies, London Leo Popma. As gong dêr in oar. Ljouwert, Netherlands. Frysk en Frij. 2013. isbn 9789085660279 Leo Popma has written an intriguing story with an intriguing title, As gong dêr in oar (As if another went there), a story that sometimes confuses and often mystifies, for there are secrets within nearly every character. Mare and Johan, the main characters , are spending a week’s vacation in a small, remote village by the sea, where Mare worked as an au pair many years ago. Both have the baggage of personal histories. And it is in this tranquil spot that the turbulence of those histories begins to reverberate as they gradually emerge through constantly shifting, episodic flashbacks . Mare, a professional interpreter with the European Union, bears the scars of a conflicted childhood, the reputation of an out-of-control party girl in her younger years and the weight of responsibility for a sixteen-year-old born out of wedlock. Johan, an architect, continues to be haunted by the violent death of Max, a close childhood friend from Indonesia , and by the heartbreak of losing his first love. Predictably, tensions arise between them from their disparate histories and temperaments as well as from the “necessary” lies and secrets that create distance between them. Conflicted relationships affect nearly every character. At the book’s center is Johan—who witnessed the shoot-out that killed Max in the hijacking of the passenger train—the boy from Malaysia whose extraordinary mind, passion for justice, and violent end left a permanently disturbing imprint. And his heart won’t heal from the broken relationship with Josi, who had to let him go, though there was real love between them. But Mare will not let him go, though there is seemingly no real love between them; Mare who forcefully insists on fidelity to one’s origins—language, culture, place— versus his unsentimental disdain for hanging on to an “illusion, a homesickness ,” a dying past; Mare who expects him to mean something to Nyk, her son (and, as he discovers, who may be his own son, too). And then there is the complicated relationship of Mare to friend and rival Inge, to Nyk and his widely divergent interest and direction from hers, but especially to her own past— her separation from her deeply rooted identity in a unique culture and language that she cannot let go or compromise. In fact, nearly every character in this novel suffers from estrangement and disconnection, from homesickness for the place and the people they left behind but which yet inhabit them. Indeed, the reader sometimes wonders whether the author meant to write an essay on the inextricable bond between language , culture, and identity, for the theme keeps recurring. For Mare, her frantic search for a “true home” proves futile and, finally, fatal. For Johan, the wandering ends when he acts on Mare’s invitation spoken in jest at the beginning: “And if you’ve had enough, go walk into the sea just like René Lung.” The serious reader will appreciate the thought-provoking substance of this novel. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Patricio Pron. My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain. Mara Faye Lethem, tr. New York. Knopf. 2013. isbn 9780307700681 To its great credit, this extremely competent novel has prompted uncritical vacuity and petty comments in some American book reviews. The novel’s narrator, never Patricio Pron of course, revisits a historical past Maurice Harmon Loose Connections Salmon Poetry This verse collection by Irish writer Maurice Harmon takes the reader into the “inking depths” of human emotion and endurance through the mutable world of loosening connections. His easy and confident voice guides us on a tour of both satisfying and disturbing experiences that we can all relate to while remaining quietly celebratory. Vasily Grossman An Armenian Sketchbook Robert Chandler & Elizabeth Chandler, tr. MacLehose Press Though perhaps best known for Life and Fate, this lovingly translated memoir by Vasily Grossman—written near the end of his life—gives the reader a rare look into his personal character. His vivid and...

“Real Adventures Must Be Sought Abroad”: Swedish Students Encounter Dublin and the Dubliners

“Real Adventures Must Be Sought Abroad”:Swedish Students Encounter Dublin and the Dubliners Angelica Granqvist I am a high-school teacher of English at the Vallentuna Gymnasium (high school), located in the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden, and have the privilege of walking in James Joyce’s footsteps every two years or so, accompanied and guided by my students, who embrace the words of Dubliners: “I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real [End Page 12] adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad” (D 21). Through the writings of Joyce, I ask my students to try to see as he did and to write a summary of their experiences in the city in the style of a story from Dubliners, thus asking them to view the city through his eyes and reflect on a life lived so long ago. These short stories are then compiled into a book—like Dubliners—and circulated among family, friends, and colleagues all over the world. Irish history and literature run like a common thread through the entire English 7 course at my school, which is analogous to the C1 level, presented by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and offered to our seniors in higher-education preparatory programs. The Swedish Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School clearly requires that “schools must help students to develop an identity that can be related to and encompass not only what is specifically Swedish, but also that which is Nordic, European, and ultimately global.” When I graduated from Uppsala University, my colleagues and I chose a motto: Non scholae sed vitae discimus—“we learn for life not for school.” We knew that, for our future students to “learn for life,” we must teach for life, using our surrounding world as our main resource. In order to do so, I constantly return to literature. Inspired by Joyce’s Dubliners, which in 1914 introduced Dublin and its contemporary inhabitants to a world stage, we, as teacher and students, come together to write our own version of the stories. Prior to our trip, I provide samples of a variety of Irish writers along with a synopsis of crucial parts of Irish history. Exploring literary Dublin gives the students a unique opportunity to translate knowledge into practice as they meet, and usually fall in love with, Dublin and the Dubliners. While still in our classroom setting in Sweden, we encounter the legacy of Joyce through his short stories and poems. Reading, however, is not the only tool to understanding—writing and the ability to think and draw conclusions are equally important and valued, and this is a large part of the students’ assignment on their return to Stockholm. In Dubliners, the ninth story, “Counterparts,” revolves around Farrington who is exasperated by his job of duplicating documents and letters. As an educator, I cannot help thinking that this is how many students feel about their education—that they are expected to absorb knowledge from a book or an online source without reflective and creative thinking that can challenge their minds. Our study of Joyce and travels to Ireland provide a refutation of this kind of rote learning. In the Dublin of 2016, like the Dublin of 1914, “[s]chool and home seem to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane” (D 23).When there are no classroom walls but an entire city of writers and their narratives, communication changes; more questions [End Page 13] are asked without the pressure of answers; and there is the validation of knowledge that is experienced, touched, smelled, tasted, heard, processed, shared, and claimed. We do all of this in Dublin, surrounded by a million Dubliners and Joyce’s whispering voice: “Shut your eyes and see” (U 3.09). I know there are students who sometimes refer to Joyce’s writing as “ancient,” but as they shift from being readers of the 1914 Dubliners and become writers about the 2016 Dubliners, everything changes. At the end of our journey, I am convinced that my students will see the purpose of being authors of the past in order to become recorders...

SHORT STORIES IN THE BALKANS AND CONTEMPORARY - SHORT STORIES IN THE WORLD

A comparative analysis of selected short stories in the Balkan countries, as well as contemporary short stories of the world, will show us that the key themes of those stories are very similar to the short stories written during the period of transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995-2010). For example, the story of the Soul Operation by an Iranian writer Mohsen Mahmalbafa, The Falcons by a Dutch writer Kader Abdolaha and On the Kitchen Stairs by a Polish writer Witold Gombrowic zinter connect with short stories by authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as The Secret of Raspberry jam by Karim Zaimović or The Devilish work of Zoran Riđanović. A common thread manifests itself in the aforementioned stories, more specifically, a common theme which focuses on the need for eradication of the seeds of submission and compliance with the political system. Most authors focus on their domestic political systems; however, some portray and analyze systems in other countries as they see it, such as a Dutch narrator who focuses on a potential threat of infringement of human freedom. Moreover, Bellow Hubei by an Argentinian writer Anhelika Gorodis her underlines the importance of humanization within a political order. Faruk Šehić examines the political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina from a slightly different perspective. His collection of stories Under Pressure emphases the issue of pressure in the above war model of short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These stories are the product of pressure and anxiety, with intent to latently promote new ways of spiritual survival, directly relating to the concept and the theme of the story The Past Age Man by Christian Karlson Stead. Further analysis of the alienation theme singled out short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Plants are Something Else by Alma Lazarevska and Dialogues by Lamija Begagić, and pointed out their connection with some recent international short stories such as The Last Defence by Mahdi Šodžaija a contemporary Persian author who indicates the inappropriateness of spousal relations and the crisis of modern marriage. The alienation theme present in many short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina also appears in a particularly impressive way in a short story Raggedy Africa by a Slovenian author Mark Švabič, which is clearly related to a short story The Seaside Fairy Tale by Miljenko Jergović from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Extremely interesting are the stories that suggest a crisis of legitimacy of culture and behavior, such as the story of Tito or Curriculum Vitae by a Slovenian writer Maja Novak, or Bankophobia by Ante Zirdum, demonstrating the individual culture of behavior and society in general in a regressive dimension manifested through addiction or phobia from banking institutions

Empire’s Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form by Mark Quigley (review)

Empire’s Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form by Mark Quigley (review)